In reply to Tim.

Hey Tim, thanks for your thorough comment! I believe that “clarity is kindness” so if the people working on Gutenberg (including myself) aren’t being clear, I appreciate you sharing that.

Let’s first recognize that Gutenberg is a huge change for WordPress. With this comes a new paradigm – blocks. Phase 2 is really all about helping WordPress users, developers, designers, etc. adopt this block paradigm without completely changing all of WordPress. My efforts in this are to help everyone get there one step at a time. This means we might take smaller steps and remain on familiar roads for the time being. Converting everything to a block (ie. widgets), and adding these blocks into the familiar experience of the Customizer is part of this.

I know this may not be the fastest path to an inline, full site editing experience, but I believe it’s the most considerate path forward. WordPress has just asked millions of users to learn a new thing, and I don’t want to push too quickly for them to learn another big thing. Phase 2, for me, is about working within the familiar patterns to bring this block paradigm into existing places where people interact with WordPress.

I hope that brings clarity to the question, “Why are you doing it this way?”

To answer your other question about where the active development is happening on the Customizer, it hasn’t really started yet. Moving Gutenberg into stand-alone editors that can be utilized outside of post_content takes some exploration to get right. There is a PR that’s helping to advance this in the wp-admin here: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/14612

The screencasts you see for the Customizer are only prototypes of design explorations. No code has been written for that yet.

I also want to note that if any suggestions haven’t been responded to, that’s my bad. I’ll address the comments you mentioned above. I haven’t been following #core-customize on slack, so I’ll try to do so. Most of the Gutenberg discussion happens in #core-editor.

I really appreciate your excitement in bridging page editing and live site customizations. And I thank you for your patience. In order to ensure this bridge is solid, we need to lay down those foundations. We might even need to build structures that parallel and help shape the ultimate experience. Phase 1 was an amazing step forward that introduced a new paradigm. Phase 2 will help the adoption of this and bring everyone along the bridge together.